So what’s wrong with existing white balance tools and why is the ColorRight Pro supposed to fix it?

Using the ColorRight Pro

The main problem with most white balance tools is that when you take your calibration shot, the gray card or white balance filter can be getting light contamination from different light sources. The theory here is that the only light source that really matters is the main (key) light. If we can narrow down the source of light we are calibrating for to mostly just the main light source, then the subject will generally have the correct white balance.

The ColorRight Pro attempts to solve this by having an angled opening in the dome that collects light from multiple angles yet favors the light from specific angles by “aiming” the dome at the main light source.

Does it work?

This may seem like a simple question but the answer can be fairly complicated. For the sake of keeping things simple, let’s just say “it depends”. This isn’t to say it doesn’t work in some situations, but more that the usefulness may vary from situation to situation which is of no fault to the ColorRight Pro and probably speaks more to improvements in modern DSLR’s ability to have automatic white balance. Let’s look at a few examples:

Automatic 4800k

ColorRight 4850k

In the first example, the ColorRight Pro corrected the white balance by only 50 degrees. Not really enough to make any real difference in the visual appearance.

Automatic 4850k

ColorRight 4850k

In the second example, the ColorRight Pro produced exactly the same white balance values as the camera’s automatic white balance.

Next it was time to see how it would do in a more unfriendly environment…under the hot lights!

Automatic 4150k

ColorRight 2900k

Under the tungsten hot lights the ColorRight Pro really showed what it is capable of. The camera’s auto white balance failed miserably to correct adequately for the extremely warm cast from the tungsten bulb. After getting a shot with the ColorRight Pro and setting the custom white balance, the next shot was perfect and required no color correction in post production.

Is the ColorRight Pro For You?

If you are only shooting outdoors during mid-day or using flash for really solid daylight balanced conditions, you may not need the ColorRight Pro and your camera will probably do pretty good. If you ever shoot in the late afternoon when the color from the Sun has gone into the warm side, ever have to deal with awkward lighting setups, or ever need to shoot JPEG, then you certainly need some kind of white balance tool.

The ColorRight Pro sells for $129.95 at B & H Photo which might be a bit pricey for some people but when you really need to rely on your white balance tools, you want to make sure what you are getting is going to do the job correctly.

Summary

I said it right up front, I don’t often use a white balance tool but when I do need one, I REALLY need one. There is simply no better way to speed up your post production workflow than to be able to completely ignore having to do white balance correction. Secondly, if you find that you need to shoot in JPEG (yes folks, there are reasons like I described above) then white balance is absolutely essential to getting the shots right.  What you have to ask yourself is if it’s worth $130 to have exceptionally good white balance. This is going to depend on you. You can spend $15 for a cheap white balance lens cap and it may be better than nothing or you can spend $130 for extremely accurate color. Only you can place a monetary value on the quality of your own images.

ColorRight Website: http://colorright.com

SpyderCUBE by Datacolor

Once in a while a product comes along that is so clever, so right, it is just a “must have” product.  While at PMA, I stumbled on such a product.  The SpyderCUBE by Datacolor is one of those products.  Nothing it does is really new, but it does everything right, in a small package, with more features than most any competitive product on the market.  For me personally, this gadget has single-handedly obsoleted my gray cards, ExpoDisc and most all other white balance devices I have seen.

Overview

First, this is an ABS plastic/resin cube with a tripod mount on the bottom stem and a metallic ball on the top.  By putting this object in a photo you shoot, you get a whole slew of exposure, white balance, specular highlight, black level, absolute black, neutral gray and white readings in light from multiple directions, all in one place from a single tool.

Features

It’s not a complexly built product, but it is a lot more sophisticated than a piece of gray cardboard that gets bent up in the pouch of your camera bag.  Each and every feature and surface of the device has a specific purpose.  If you use Aperture or Lightroom, taking advantage of this tool is quick and easy.

Specifications

Usage

I have used this product in a couple of tests so far with my Canon 5D Mark II, and the results are both amazing and as expected.  At the beginning of my shoot, I put this SpyderCUBE (attached to a flexible tripod) on a flat surface somewhere in the shoot.  I take an initial shot with it in the photo.  Once I get into Lightroom, I use the eyedropper to set my white balance setting for the room, and then apply that setting across the rest of the photos that I shot in that scene.

Another possibility is to use the cube in a photo to set the on-camera custom white balance.  If you get the cube to take up a a good bit of the image, the camera can set white balance right from it.

Results

Original Auto White Balance Canon 5DII

So, here are some tests that I did to see how well this works.  Follow along with me.

First, I grabbed my Canon 5D Mark II with a 16-35MM F2.8L lens and set white balance to auto white balance (AWB), walked out my back door, sat the SpyderCUBE with a mini-tripod onto a crate of travertine on my back patio.  There is some white Styrofoam and fairly white stone there in the shot, so I figured it would get a pretty decent white balance with the auto setting on my camera.  As you can see, the photo isn’t too bad for color (click it to enlarge).  The camera calculated the white balance at 4500ºK.

Lightroom's eyedropper tool

I then brought the image into Adobe LightRoom to do a little light balance work there.  In the develop mode of lightroom, there is a small eyedropper you can select and use to point to a neutral gray on the image.  This is what the SpyderCUBE is all about… giving you that perfect neutral gray in both direct light and indirect light.  You can see from the image to the right that the Lightroom eyedropper gives a pattern of pixel colors around where you are about to click, as well as the RGB value of the pixel you are hovering over.

Lightroom Corrected - 5000ºK

Once you click the mouse, Lightroom immediately re-calculates the white balance for the scene and changes the white balance setting to the new calculation.  In this case, that setting is 500ºK warmer, or 5000ºK.  If I had just shot a whole series of photos in this scene, I would now apply the new white balance setting to all of the images in the series to get the color correct on all of them.  This one step alone can save many of us from manually tweaking the color settings in our images, but shooting outdoors is not typically a hard situation to white balance.

Mixed lighting indoors + AWB

A scenario that is really hard for most cameras to auto white balance is a mixture of indoor light sources, including halogen, tungsten, fluorescent and ambient light from windows.  I am sure that many of you have had this situation where you shoot an indoor scene with AWB set and what you get is an orange cast image that is just completely wrong as your camera’s auto white balance just cannot figure out the lighting.  So, I have set up that exact situation with the modeling lights from my strobes through soft boxes and halogen overhead lights, plus mid-day sunlight coming in through the windows.  This shot is a mess!  And it is so typical of using the AWB setting on so many cameras when shooting indoors.

Camera AWB reading

Looking at the settings in Lightroom, this image was read as a color temperture of 4050ºK.  The multiple light sources have thrown the camera for a loop.  But again, with the eyedropper and selecting the neutral gray, and this time you can see a much more dramatic change over the last example.

Corrected White Balance

The corrected image now has a color space of 2750ºK, which is 1300ºK different than the original calculations by the camera.  And look how obvious that difference is! As a matter of fact, I could not find a single situation where the color wasn’t ever so slightly off from my camera using the AWB setting.  That alone tells me that this SpyderCUBE needs to travel everywhere my camera travels.

Histogram as shot

This brings up another interesting tip with Lightroom and using the Histogram in the upper right corner.  Let’s take a look at the Histogram for this image (right).  Notice the triangles at the upper left and right of this image?  They actually serve a purpose.  They can tell you if your image has absolute blacks and whites in the range of the image.  Notice how both triangles are gray – the same color a the background of the Histogram?

No blue shows here

If you click on the triangle, it will highlight.  If you look at your image, it will now show blue wherever absolute black appears in the photo.  In this case, there really isn’t any absolute black to notice.  Even the hole in the bottom of the SpyderCUBE is not showing any blue.  But we can fix this.

Sliding the Histogram

Next, we roll our mouse pointer over the lower portion of the Histogram, and click.  A <|> symbol appears and we can now drag the histogram for the lower light portion of the image and move the black point.  As we slowly move it left, you will see the triangle turn blue just as the first pixels of absolute black appear on the screen.  Move it a touch more and it turns white.  When the triangle is gray, none of the image is at absolute black.  When it turns blue, the image is perfectly set with the darkest color in the photo at absolute black.  As you drag further and it turns white you are now clipping some of the darker colors in the image to black.  This is a powerful tool and tells us a lot about the luminance range of our image.

White point clipping

The upper end of the histogram serves the same purpose with the white point of the image.  When I click it, the specular highlight of the SpiderCUBE’s chrome ball reflects the brightest light source in the image and pixels begin to appear in red where the white point of the image begins to clip.  By adjusting this area of the histogram, we can fine tune the white point of the image and control the clipping at the brightest point we wish. You can also click both of the triangles and see the white and black clipping points in red and blue at the same time.

AWB shot for in camera WB

One last test was to see if I could set the camera’s custom white balance from just shooting the SpyderCUBE.  Using the same lighting setup as the studio shots above, I put the SpyderCUBE about 6″ away from my lens and shot it with AWB.  As you can see, the same white point issues.  This shot came out at around 4150ºK, which is pretty far off.  I then went into the menu on the camera and told it to set a custom white balance using this photo as a reference.  This was an interesting test as I made sure that there were other colors visible in the photo.

In-camera custom white balance

The camera re-set the white balance to 2900ºK.  I changed exposure slightly, took the SpyderCUBE out of the shot and re-took the photo with the new white balance setting, and as you can see… a huge improvement!  Once again, the SpyderCUBE has done its job.  even with all kinds of strange light combinations, it has saved the day and set the white balance properly.  From now on, this little baby goes wherever my camera goes.

The SpyderCUBE is available at B&H and Amazon for $59 as of the writing of this review.  Although it is a bit more than you will pay for a white balance card, and a little bulkier, there are some distinct advantages to having the extra features of this product… like specular highlight and absolute black.

The SpyderCUBE and a series of demonstration videos videos can be found at the Datacolor website.

Product Review Scorecard

*PHD Cameras – Acronym for “Push Here, Dummy”, meaning the world of simple point and click digital cameras.

Author: Maurice Naragon
Digital Creations
Website Development and Marketing
Professional Photography in Orange County, CA

Summary
It’s one thing to know that throwing your aperture open to 2.8 will give you a shallow depth of field and closing it down to F22 will extend the depth of field. If you do a lot of portraits you probably have a good formula you use for a particular lens like setting your 50mm prime lens at F11 so that at a 10′ shooting distance you will get 12″ of depth so that an entire head is in focus. You may have learned this from numerous shots until you instinctively have a base setup even if you don’t have notes on your exact setup. But what do you do when you want a very specific shot and don’t want to spend all day doing trial and error?

Features
The Expoaperture² kit comes with two discs, one covering focal lengths from 15 – 135 and focal distances of 2′ to about 30′. The second disc covers 70mm – 600mm and focal distances from 30′ to about 1200′. The nice thing about how the discs work is that you set your sensor size and then you can use any combination of variables to come up with the remaining number. For example, if I set the dials for 24mm I can see that at f4 I will get 2.5 zones, if I then turn the disc over I can calculate the shooting distance I will see that a shooting distance of 3′ will give me a DoF from 2.5″ to 3.75″. If I am unsure of the aperture to use to obtain a 1′ DoF at a 6′ distance I can see that I will be looking for a 1 zone width so by making sure my focal length is at 24mm I see I will need an f1.6 aperture for the short distance I want or if I move to a 50mm I will need to shoot at f8 for the same result. Using the discs in this way will not only help you determine the amount of DoF you can get, but it can also be used as a tool to help you plan what lenses you will need for a given shoot.

Let’s say we want to shoot a football game and want to know what kind of shots we can expect from different lenses. Knowing that my long lenses is a 70-300 and the average shot will be around 100′ away, I want to make sure I have about a 10′ +/- DoF, I see that I will only need about ¼ of a zone I can quickly see that shooting at 70mm will give a HUGE amount of DoF because the maximum aperture for this lens is 4.0 so that’s going to give me a DoF range from 55′ to 150′. If I move to 150mm and shoot at f5.6 my DoF drops to about 60′ to 160′, and shooting at 300mm at f5.6 cuts the DoF down to about 90′ to 120′ which is going to give me the DoF I am looking for, not too short, not too long.

Usage
To demonstrate how this system works, we decided to set up a shoot that would utilize how the discs work. For this shot to work we wanted to show the model’s face and hands but wanted the gun barrel to be out of focus. Since we are using a Canon 30D, we first set the sensor size/format to 1.6 as that is the crop factor for the 30D sensor. Second, we are going to start with a 50mm Prime lens so we set the yellow focal length to 50mm. On the back of the disc we look at the shooting length of 10′ and we can see that the focus length we want to work with is within 1 zone in each direction, flipping the disc back over and finding the #1 on the dial (for 1 zone) we see that the actual aperture we want to use is going to be between f8 – f11 to get the entire rifle and model in focus and using f5.6 is going to give me about 18″ of focus distance so I can either get the model and part of the rifle or the front part of the rifle to about the mid-point. Before using the disc, I would have probably started up at f2.8 and then would have spent quite a bit of time and test shots getting the DoF correct. With the Expoaperture disc I actually had the shoot planned out with a handful of shots I wanted prior to even setting up the camera.

Results
The discs may seem a little confusing at first because there are multiple ways to actually use them. If you watch the video and work through some scenarios in your head a few times like I did above, it won’t take long at all to get a really good feel for how they work. Using the discs to pre-plan a shoot like I did for this article is a huge time saver, especially if you are using assistants since you can just give them a shot list and have them setup your camera almost perfectly before you even look through the shutter. The discs themselves are made from what feels like a plastic laminate that should hold up to a lot of usage and they come with their own soft plastic carrying cases to keep them from getting dinged up in your camera bag. Unless you simply have a knack for understanding what settings you need to obtain the exact depth of field you want, then getting a set of Expoaperture discs is a worth considering. As a training tool, using the discs a few times will help you to understand the correlation between the settings and will help you to learn how to judge the settings you want better.

Equipment Used

Author: Kerry Garrison
Model: Taylor Thorne

Correcting white balance with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 from Kerry Garrison on Vimeo.

White Balance is used to tell the camera what the current value of the light sources is. Here is a good example maybe some of you have experienced, you take a picture indoors with a lamp next to your subject and when you look at the picture there is a bad orange color across the picture. This is because an incandesenct bulb has a very warm (expressed in degrees Kelvin) temperature of the light (red side of the spectrum). Another common example is taking photos in the snow and ending up with a blue cast on everything because the sun’s reflection off snow becomes a very low temperature (blue side of the spectrum). In many cases, a camera’s auto white balance will do a pretty good job but properly setting you camera to the correct white balance can dramatically improve your photos.

Here are three examples of the same shot with different white balance settings:

Warm Temperature

Cool Temperature

Shade Temperature

Setting the camera on an indoor setting results in an orange cast while setting the balance to a tungsten light results in a blue cast, but setting the balance to a shade setting results in a good looking picture.

Of course, it’s not always as simple as selecting the right setting on the camera, especially when you have mixed sources of light such as a fluorescent light combined with a flash. To overcome this you will need to do a custom white balance. We will go into much more detail when we discuss this in a future article, but how can you quickly get a decent white balance?

There are several excellent products on the market to help you such as the ExpoDisc or ExpoCap and card systems like the WhiBal cards. The simplist thing you can do is run over to your local camera supply store and get a gray card, just ask, they will know what you want. When you are ready to take a picture, you take a custom white balance of the scene by shooting the card. Consult your camera’s manual for instructions on the exact procedure for setting the custom white balance. A little practice and your photos will look MUCH better with very little effort.

Now get out and start shooting!